Three Points of No Return
-- Glimpses of the Future?

Neither the New Wave nor the finest individual books of Science Fiction have managed to capture the interest of the Media or of the literary and cultural Establishment -- at least not in Germany. Stand on Zanzibar is granted as little recognition as the Dispossessed , Dune is not noticed and neither is the Foundation Trilogy - at least not in Germany. They are all lumped together and degraded as pulp and dismissed without a word.

In the last two years however, strange to say, a change has crept in. Cyberpunk has made it; Cyberpunk is a mega-hit! I'm not saying that this has made Science Fiction respectable at one blow and that the barriers of the Ghetto have fallen like the Berlin wall. No, Science Fiction still has to defend itself as much as ever against lack of understanding and prejudice. But with Cyberpunk, for the first time Science Fiction has managed to exert an unexpectedly wide influence beyond its traditional limits. This keen interest was shown not only by readers but by the media and without any special publicity.

How could this happen?
The novels of Gibson, Kadrey, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Sterling, Swanwick and Williams aroused only a moderate interest among SF readers in Germany. The traditional Science Fiction public, especially the hard-liners, who grew up with their Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, did not understand or accept these books; sometimes they hated them. Was this something to do with the translations? Not at all. Cyberpunk is extremely difficult to translate; I was aware of this because I knew and valued the stories of the Cyberpunk authors from the beginning and gave the translation of their books to my best translators.

I also feel that the traditional Science Fiction readers are still under the lying spell of the Gernsback Continuum, the beautiful illusion of a perfect World of Tomorrow, last refuge of the utopian ideas of the day before yesterday. This is the dream of the spotless arks up there in orbit, at the Lagrange points and further out, filled with clean air, pure water and human beings with pure hearts. This is the step into space, a new beginning. Meanwhile, down below, a run-down Earth suffocates under a flood of human beings and decays in its own filth, simmering away towards its doom under a layer of Carbon dioxide while the ozone gap grows wider and wider....

Readers who dream of a beautiful elitist future, based on the glossy brochures from NASA and ESA... and always a bit fascistoid, it seems to me... must find it disgusting and nasty when Michael Swanwick for instance, in Vacuum Flowers describes the Habitats quite differently. We hear of the filthy slums proliferating in their weightless zones, inhabited by riff-raff of doubtful genetic origin, teeming with life and bringing with it all the stink and chemicals of this anarchistic excess of life.

I find these anarchistic visions fascinating, bizarre and exotic whether they ever come into being or not. I think conditions like these are more likely and more human than a perfect, spotless Utopia. When Man leaves the Earth he will take his world with him, just as it is, just as the animals who once moved on to dry land took the ocean with them. To this day the salt content of our blood is that of sea water.

But where does this enthusiasm for Cyberpunk come from? Does it come, strangely enough, from outside the traditional Science Fiction readership? Cyberpunk has opened a new area of space -- the space behind the monitor screen. It promises the imagination new game variations, it gives the feeling of omniscience, of being everywhere at once. It promises, above all, a new form of existence, loosed from the bonds of the physical body with all its biological limitation and its vulnerability. Here we have uncanny new territory and a bundle of fascinating effects which capture the imagination of all those who, sitting before a screen, suddenly become aware of the possibility of transcendence in the software.

All this has certainly contributed to the popularity of Cyberpunk, but this alone is not enough to arouse the interest of those who usually take no notice of Science Fiction. I believe Cyberpunk has touched upon something... merely scratched the surface of the subject, not plumbed its depths... which I regard as a point of no return in human evolution, yes, in the evolution of life on Earth. It is the end of the trial-and-error method, steered by chance, in the area of genetics. The making of designer creations, whether vegetable or animal or a mixture of both, as well as made-to-measure persons, long foreseen by Huxley in Brave New World , has now become possible. Laws will keep high-handed gene manipulation within bounds, at least for a time, but the technique will not be halted. The possibility of specific alterations is too much of a challenge for the scientists. The seduction of the possible is too great and what is possible is not only interesting but on top of that it is financially rewarding.

The opening up of this wide and dangerous field of research and application fills everyone who knows the risks with a mixture of fascination and dread. It would be going too far at this moment to follow up individual dangers. There are many scenarios in Science Fiction of industrial accidents which change the world from Pedler/Davis Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater to Greg Bear's Blood Music . Other problems just as relevant have been announced here and there: the standardised Genom de luxe, selection at a molecular level -- a molecular Auschwitz; a sort of genetic Golden Credit Card for the higher echelons in Management and Politics; discrimination against those alleged to be genetically inferior and the problem of data protection in this intimate sphere.

Then there is the clone as a spare parts store for accident victims and a source of organ replacements for the Geriatric department; the possibility of destructively high expectations from cloned people, whose right to their own biography would be denied. In short the power of the dead over the living, the attempt by the parent generation to decide the fate of its posterity. The result will not be "Children of Thunder" who punch their parents in the face for this genetic interference, but terribly healthy, terribly conformist, terribly boring creatures like those in Huxley's horrific vision.

What Cyberpunk has made clear is the weird, frightening but morbidly exciting possibility that our species has reached a point where it gives up the picture of itself, its own self-image. The picture of mankind -- made by God in his own image, as some believe -- is ready to dissolve. Greg Bear tried to make this clear to his public in a scene described by Norman Spinrad:

"How many of you think people will look recognisably human fifty years from now?" he asked.
A forest of hands.
"You are all wrong", Bear declared with his usual calm geniality.

And in another place David Brin used it as the motto for one of the chapters in The Uplift War :

"Natural selection won't matter soon, not anywhere near as much as conscious selection. We will civilise and alter ourselves to suit our ideas of what we can be. Within one more human lifespan, we will have changed ourselves unrecognisably".

"Evolution chez Sterling moves in clades or to daughter species; it does not move linearly, it radiates. Successful species do not evolve in a straight line into a single daughter species, they radiate into a multitude of successor species."

Reality could soon look much more exotic and baroque than all that the Science Fiction authors have thought up in this century, but if we believe William Gibson, and we have no reason not to, reality has very little meaning for those who go into the interface. Gibson's virtual reality opens up a boundless cosmos of possible experiences; it promises the sensation of countless parallel realities. A human being can enter into these realities at will and they are no longer experienced as simulation: there are surrogate worlds without number, giving promise of the thrill of many lives, yes, even a promise of eternal life in the transcendence of Cyberspace.

That is the fascination of Cyberpunk and it is difficult not to fall under its spell. Many readers, for whom Science Fiction otherwise meant little, have made this discovery.